Elminster in Myth Drannor - Ed Greenwood [15]
Mystra had sent him to Cormanthor on a mission. Just what he was supposed to do there she hadn't revealed yet, but he'd be needed there, she'd said, "in time to come." It didn't sound like anything one had to hurry to, but El wanted to see the legendary city of the elves. It was the most beautiful place in all Faerun, the minstrels said, full of wonders and elven folk so handsome that looking upon them took one's breath away. A place of revels and magical marvels and singing, where fantastic mansions thrust spires to the stars, and the forest and the city grew around each other in a vast, rolling garden. A place where they killed non-elves on sight.
Well, there was a line in an old ballad about stupid brigands that had become a wry saying among Athalantans: "We'll just have to burn that treasure when we get our hands on it." It would have to serve him in the days ahead. El rather suspected that he'd be spending a lot of time drifting around Cormanthor as a watching, listening mist.
Better that, he supposed, than spending the eternal oblivion of death by spells, to sink forgotten into the earth of an elven garden somewhere, his service to Mystra unfulfilled.
The young man paused at the base of a shadowtop as large around as a cottage, swung his saddlebag from one shoulder to another, stretched like a cat, and set off south and east again, walking fast. His boots made no sound as he trod the empty air. He glanced at the still waters of a little pool as he passed, and they reflected back the image of an unshaven, straggle-bearded youth with keen blue eyes, black tangled hair, a sharp beak of a nose, and a long, gangly build. Not unhandsome, but not particularly trustworthy in appearance, either. Well, he was going to have to impress some elf, sometime…
Had he looked back at the right moment, El would have seen a cloud of clinging mushrooms rise from the damp forest floor as something unseen disturbed them, and settle softly again as whatever it was whispered a curse and turned hastily aside. Was the young man ahead going to blunder straight into the guarded heart of Cormanthor?
Then the forest gloom to the south and east gave sudden birth to spreading rings of fire, and the ground shook. Yes, it seemed he was.
Elminster hurried forward, running on the air, swinging his saddlebag fore and aft in one hand to give him the momentum to surge forward in earnest. That had been a battle spell, hurled in haste.
Leaves were still flaming in dancing branches ahead, and a tree crashed down somewhere to the west, in answer to the deep, rolling force of the explosion that had shuddered past him moments before.
Elminster dodged around a long side-limb and over a rise, descending into a rocky, fern-filled dell beyond. At its bottom, a spring welled up between old and mossy boulders-one of which was just tumbling back to earth, trailing flames and the spinning bones of something torn apart.
Figures were trotting and scrambling and hacking among those boulders. Elves, El saw, who were fighting burly red-skinned warriors whose mouths jutted tusks, and whose black leather armor bristled with daggers and axes and maces.
Hobgoblins had surprised the elves at the stream and slain most of them. As El raced closer above the ferns, his bag sending them dancing and waving in his wake, an elven sword flashed with spell light as it rose and fell. Its quarry fell away, snarling in pain and clutching at a ravaged neck, as an iron bar wielded by another hobgoblin came down on the head of the elven swordsman with a solid thud that echoed across the dell, sickeningly loud.
The elf s head collapsed in a spray of gore, and his twitching body fell against his companion. This last survivor of the elven patrol, it seemed, was a tall elf who wore a shoulder mantle adorned with rows